Amstrad Action reviews

[chinnyhill10]

Maybe he feels the c64 coverage should reflect the coverage the c64 got in the 80s  uk magazines?

Well he needs to stop living in the 1980's then. It's 2015.

[dodogildo]

Are you guys also thinking that having Amstrad with a great Basic interpreter instead of a dumb C64 with nothing but games (an excellent catalog I have to admit) during our childhood made us more intelligent human beings in the end? Yes I'm joking but there may be some truth in that

What are you saying?

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

[Carnivius]

Are you guys also thinking that having Amstrad with a great Basic interpreter instead of a dumb C64 with nothing but games (an excellent catalog I have to admit) during our childhood made us more intelligent human beings in the end? 

Well, no.  Cos I'm a frickin' moron.


I don't think the C64 game catalogue was all that great  Even my C64 owning friend says smooth scrolling and a nice tune just made a lot of very mediocre games seem better than they were.   Yes there were some great games but it never felt that much more or less than CPC or Spectrum really.  A lot of C64 owners just seem to brag like it was this all-amazing machine that was somehow even better than an Amiga.

[Lazy Dude]

I grew up with a 464 as my fave toy, but my mate had a speccy and he had hundreds of games for it. So I like both.
Amigas were for posh people and BBC micros were for wierdos!!
yeh the 80's were fun times

[Zoe Robinson]

I grew up with an Amstrad CPC at home (first a 464, then my wonderful chip-swapped 464 with a 6128 CPU), my cousin down the road owning a ZX Spectrum and my other cousin down a different road owning a C64. My friends all had either an Amstrad CPC 464 or a ZX Spectrum. In other words, I had a pretty good idea of how each computer worked and what they had to offer.


The C64 was incredibly slow and clunky compared to the other, newer, computers around. Yes it looked good and sounded good but I hated its stupid loading commands. What was LOAD"*",8 then RUN all about? Even the Speccy managed to load games with less keypresses and it had a stupid BASIC built in!


Admittedly that's because it's an older computer whose creators were working from a different set of goals to Sinclair and Amstrad but it never gelled with me. Also, its BASIC wasn't as nice (i.e. familiar to me at the time) as ours.


The Spectrum was a wonderful machine and I always loved its simplicity but oh my goodness, its colour handling sucked to the point where it was painfully obvious even back then, when I was a little kid. I never found its beeper all that annoying at the time but looking back, it wasn't great either. I think that's a testament to how well the programmers of the time managed to squeeze passable tunes from it.


The CPC had its flaws, too. It was a bulky machine thanks to its need for a monitor and if you didn't have a wrist wrest, you were getting RSI after prolonged use (and I did, it still hurts like hell) but there's no comparing its complete in-built BASIC and the intuitive tape and disk commands built into AMSDOS. Want to run a game? Type Run"" and follow the on-screen instructions. Simple!


People go on and on about how its sound chip sucked but let's be fair, it didn't. It's possible to get speech out of the AY chip (as FaceHugger demonstrated wonderfully with the Ultimate Megademo and some games programmers showed with their in-game speech). The chip is stereo and handles it pretty well. The colour palette is large and although some of the colours were a little garish even at the time, there were lots of them to choose from and you could redefine the garish ones to something less eye-watering with only one line of BASIC code.


Out of the three main systems, the CPC was definitely the all-rounder. It may not have been able to handle scrolling as well as the others, thanks to its huge memory requirements for buffering graphics (if the 6128 had been the standard to program for, would this have even been an issue?) compared to the other systems but smooth scrolling isn't everything; and we could vertical scroll with the best of them. The C64 had nicer sound, but only to a point and the Speccy had some wonderful chunky graphics capabilities with scrolling, but I said it at the time and I still say it now: you can keep those bells and whistles, the CPC didn't need them. It's still the one for me.

[EgoTrip]

The C64 had a technically superior sound chip to most other 8-bits, but it still sounded to me like a wet fart. The AY was on paper inferior, but it sounded better and to me, that's what counts. But that's just my personal opinion.

My reply was meant tounge-in-cheek, I don't go for all this format war crap (unless it comes to Apple products, and that's nothing to do with technical ability its due to the morally bankrupt ethics of Apple). Its incredibly childish but I guess people like to cling on to good and bad things from their childhood.

[||C|-|E||]

We should start discussing about Sega and Nintendo as well, I mean, NES vs Master System and Megadrive vs SNES. Then, we could continue the fight with PSOne vs Saturn; PS2 vs Dreamcast; PS3 vs XBOX360 and PS4 vs XBOXOne. We could even meet in a waste ground and take some baseball bats with us, what is the point of discussing things in a forum when you can hit somebody? 

[Fessor]

Poor Atarians.... third page of thread open and no mention about xl/xe...

[Andrew Green]

The problem with the C64 was that the hardware was heavily geared towards sprite based scrolling games, and whilst a lot of these were very good, Wizball, Uridium, Paradroid, it lost out to the Spectrum and Amstrad for games which relied on complex calculations, most notably vector and filled-vector games. I think you had to be a better programmer to get a decent game out of the Speccy and Amstrad, as you had to everything yourself, whereas with the C64, a lot of the work was done for you (I suppose a good analogy would be like the difference between a manual car and an automatic).

As a result, Spectrum games were more varied than the C64 (Amstrad was perhaps a little late to the party to be truly innovative, and suffered because programmers often took the lazy option of just porting the Spectrum version across). Where the Amstrad shone were in games which were designed for that machine, the Get Dexters and Spindizzys.

[AMSDOS]

The C64 was incredibly slow and clunky compared to the other, newer, computers around. Yes it looked good and sounded good but I hated its stupid loading commands. What was LOAD"*",8 then RUN all about? Even the Speccy managed to load games with less keypresses and it had a stupid BASIC built in!

The asterisks "*" tells the system to boot the 1st file on the disk, "8" represents Drive A, this can range from 8 to 15, an additional parameter is normally used as well, so it looks like "LOAD"*",8,1 the "1" tells the system to Execute a M/C file, so if the file was BASIC it would be 0.

[Zoe Robinson]

The asterisks "*" tells the system to boot the 1st file on the disk, "8" represents Drive A, this can range from 8 to 15, an additional parameter is normally used as well, so it looks like "LOAD"*",8,1 the "1" tells the system to Execute a M/C file, so if the file was BASIC it would be 0.

See, this is what I'm talking about. From a techie point of view, this is an interesting and potentially useful system but from a user's point of view, that's ridiculously over-complex. A simply LOAD" or RUN" would have been much more user-friendly.

[Zoe Robinson]

Poor Atarians.... third page of thread open and no mention about xl/xe...

The moment Atari didn't make this, they were dead to me:





The Atari/Nintendo Adanced Entertainment System

[ukmarkh]

In this forum, I feel safe in saying that the CPC held its own against the other two... And on the odd occasion smashed 'em outta the park   

[dcdrac]

In this forum, I feel safe in saying that the CPC held its own against the other two... And on the odd occasion smashed 'em outta the park 

Just look at what the French, Spanish and Germans got out of it...

[chinnyhill10]

The moment Atari didn't make this, they were dead to me:

Talk about trying to look like an MSX!

[Zoe Robinson]

Talk about trying to look like an MSX!

Isn't it just?! When I first saw it, I thought it was an MSX.

[Puresox]

The problem Amstrad will always have against all the rest of the computers , is that it really doesn't have a killer App. There are virtually very few reasons to get an Amstrad because it has a game that was only built for it . The BBC , Apple, MSX Commodore, Atari, Spectrum. Have many games that can't be topped on other machines . The Amstrad has a few but not enough to turn the heads of majority of 80's 8 bit gamers. 

[Zoe Robinson]

Oh, I don't know, we had a fair few exclusives as I recall (and also as TV Tropes recalls).

[Puresox]

Not enough to give people a reason to indulge unfortunately. Get Dexter was good but not ground breaking , Socery was ok but nowt special . Nothing really comes to mind other than those at mo .

[MacDeath]

(first a 464, then my wonderful chip-swapped 464 with a 6128 CPU)

what does it mean ?
A CPC464 with a CPC6128 motherboard ?
I mean, "the chip" is supposed to be the same, it is a Z80, with Gate array and CRTC, Rams, and so on.

Had some slightly different CRTC perhaps, more RAM of course and extra ROM and extra chips to handle the extra RAM and Disks.

So I am quite curious, was it just a CPC464 + extra RAM + Disk drive ? or something else ?


I somewhat agree with the comments on C64's sounds.
not sure if it is due to emulation but many C64 game's music as heard on youtube are not pleasing to hears... it is not a clean sound at all.


Many of the "great CPC games" were actually good on every systems, I think about Barbarian per exemple, or had really bad versions on other systems but miraculously the CPC version has a great one (Gryzor).

The fact industry wasn't trying to make really great games on this machine specifically is well know, they would get ports on/of many different systems so they had to cut the costs.

Being "all rounded"  made it somewhat difficult because CPC lacked a little extra thing to be more exploitable by game industry of that era.
Having a bit more RAM per example could really have helped, else some slight hardware acceleration somewhere.

But when games had not a lot of scrollings, they could really compete well with other systems... Solomon's key per example.
And as RPG were guite rare on CPC, it is quite a shame as CPC6128 could really outshine other systems on this sort of games.
The very Few RPG don't even account for CPC specificity.
Pirates, Bard's Tales... were actually graphic ports from Apple2 or C64 so the graphics are not really the  extra wow factor to keep the edge...

[pelrun]

I expect he meant 6128 ROM, not CPU.

[Zoe Robinson]

I expect he meant 6128 ROM, not CPU.

She.

what does it mean? A CPC464 with a CPC6128 motherboard? I mean, "the chip" is supposed to be the same, it is a Z80, with Gate array and CRTC, Rams, and so on.Had some slightly different CRTC perhaps, more RAM of course and extra ROM and extra chips to handle the extra RAM and Disks.So I am quite curious, was it just a CPC464 + extra RAM + Disk drive ? or something else ?

I was always told it was "chip-swapped" and that's what stuck as a phrase. I was nine at the time and more interested in games and some light programming than messing about with hardware so I never looked into it. I'll describe the computer though:

464 case,
64k RAM expansion,
DDI-1 disk drive.

The case was modded however. I may have just been the ROM (it probably was, in fact, as some games and other software that were designed specifically for a 464 or a 6128 would have problems on my machine - most likely because they were expecting some keyboard call or whatever that was coming in different to what it thought it should be) but it has BASIC 1.1 and the welcome phrase on boot-up is the usual 6128 welcome screen, i.e. 'Amstrad 128K Microcomputer (v3)'.

[MacDeath]

464 case,
64k RAM expansion,
DDI-1 disk drive.

ok I understand a bit more...
There were some special "RAM extansions" that would actually act like CPC6128 converters, replacing ROM, adding RAM and the extra components from a CPC6128 but it wasn't totally like a real CPC6128 as I heard.

Basically the DD-1 if being the 464 model includes the extra chips for Disk Drive (even a ROM), while the 64K expansion includes the Extra 64K stuffs.

[pelrun]

She.

I was always told it was "chip-swapped" and that's what stuck as a phrase. I was nine at the time and more interested in games and some light programming than messing about with hardware so I never looked into it. I'll describe the computer though:

Oh! My apologies.


Yep, that's definitely a rom-swap (which is also a chip so "chip-swapped" is perfectly accurate.) Along with the disk drive and the memory expansion your machine should run most of the software that the 464 would normally balk at. Any incompatibilities are usually down to the disk drive - some old 464 software uses memory that was taken by the disk interface.

[Shaun M. Neary]

Ultimate childish response to speccy owners in 1988

"If your computer is so good, how come the company that made mine ended up buying the company that made yours?"
Amongst 12 and 13 year olds, there was very little comeback to that one.

One of the advantages I used to be able to have over C64 owners were significantly faster load times on tape...
... until multi-load games lost the run of themselves, and by then, the Sega and Nintendo was looming as the christmas trees went up.